Clint Hartung, Once a Promising Giant, Dies at 87

Published: July 21, 2010

Any ballplayer who makes it to the big leagues has achieved much and can be said to have succeeded beyond the expectations he generated in youth. But Clint Hartung is largely, and perhaps unfairly, remembered as the exception to the rule.

Major League Baseball

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A strapping Texan who excelled as both a pitcher and a hitter in high school, in the minor leagues and on military service teams, Hartung had been touted as both the next Babe Ruth
and the next Christy Mathewson by the time he was signed by the New York Giants. Then he hit a home run in his first at-bat, during an intrasquad game, in spring training in 1947.

By 2001, the baseball historian and statistics guru Bill James had created an unofficial award in his honor, so to speak, describing the most overhyped rookie of each decade of baseball history the winner of the Clint Hartung Award. But the reputation was especially ingrained in the minds of fans from the era who waited and waited for Hartung to live up to his press clippings.

In 1987, when Mario Cuomo
was governor of New York, he was also a co-owner of a fantasy baseball
franchise; for its poor performance, Governor Cuomo blamed his partner, whom he referred to, in an interview in The Times, as “perhaps the worst judge of baseball ability since a scout signed Clint Hartung.”

The cause of Hartung’s death was congestive heart failure, said Kati Curry, who spent much of her childhood with Hartung and his wife, Carolyn, saying they treated her like a granddaughter. Hartung didn’t speak often of his career, Ms. Curry said, “but he felt really lucky to have gotten to play.”

Clinton Clarence Hartung was born in Hondo, Tex., west of San Antonio, on Aug. 10, 1922, and led the local high school team to a state baseball championship in 1939. He played for a season in the minor leagues in Eau Claire, Wis., batting .358 with 12 home runs in 66 games and, as a pitcher, compiling a 3-1 record.

He spent the duration of World War II playing for Army Air Forces baseball teams, including the Hickam Field Bombers in Hawaii, for whom he won 25 consecutive decisions as a pitcher and hit .567. These exploits brought him to the Giants, and to the pages of both Time and Life magazines. “One-Man Ball Team,” the headline of the Life article
about him declared.

At 6-foot-4 or 6-foot-5 and well over 200 pounds, he was routinely described as Bunyanesque. His career as a pitcher began well — he was 9-7 his first season — but he was a poor outfielder, and his managers, first Mel Ott and then Leo Durocher, seemed not to know whether he was better as a pitcher or an everyday player, and he never sustained distinction as either. His career
pitching record was 29-29, his batting average .238.

His most famous moment on the field was as a pinch-runner. Just before Bobby Thomson’s home run, the so-called “shot heard round the world” in the third 1951 National League playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, which the Giants won to advance to the World Series, Hartung replaced Don Mueller at third base after Mueller hurt an ankle in a slide.

Hartung played three more seasons in the minor leagues before returning to Texas to work for an oil company in Sinton, near Corpus Christi, and to play for its semi-pro baseball team.

He was married three times and divorced twice. His third wife, Carolyn, died in 2004. In addition to Ms. Curry and her sister, Liz Hutchins, who was also reared partly in the Hartung home, he is survived by several children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Specific information about them was unavailable.

In 1983, a reporter for Texas Monthly magazine visited Hartung at his home in Sinton and portrayed him in an article
as reticent, modest and without regret.